About

About Us

Ahl Al-bait Society is a Scottish Registered Charity (SC167651) established in 1991. The membership and governing structure is clearly described in its Memorandum (Appendix 1).

The Charity established with the aim of working with ethnic minorities from the Middle East promoting our cultural heritage, religious faith and vital community services. This includes practising Islamic faith, teaching our kids how to become good Muslims, helping our community to settle and integrate within the Scottish communities so individuals and families can become active contributors for their adopted home. Reflecting on the work we have done on Climate Change over the last year we now feel it is important to incorporate our environmental aims into our mission statement.

Using donations and individual contributions from members of Shia communities in Glasgow mostly from Iraq and Lebanon, Ahl Al-Bait Society established at 25 Woodside Place, Glasgow in 1991.

Ahl Al-Bait Society has grown from its original roots and its activities are well known and its efforts are well recognised within its target groups. The community centre is available to the regular use of community members for social, cultural and education purposes which help to bring the wider community together. The organisation benefits from knowledge and expertise of a large number of active members with experiences in diverse fields of medicine, education and business professionals.

We have the pleasure to work with other communities, organisations and government bodies such as Scottish Police and the centre become the third party of hate crime and members can come and tell the centre of their experience (Appendix 2), Scottish Politician, Muslim Council of Scotland and Scottish authorities to develop further understanding between people of different ethnic minorities to foster integration and better relationship with larger Scottish Community. Ahl Al-Bait Society hold several events such as Eid party joining with Police, and Peace and Unity Conference hold in Celtic Park to more than 500 re-presenters from different Societies and Organisations including Politician, Councillors, Universities lecturers including the First Minister, Lord Province and the Head of the Army and police and also leaders of different parties (Appendix 3).

We also have youth committee at Strathclyde and Glasgow Universities to work with new student and help to settle in Glasgow. We in addition support and promote Al-Tawheed Arabic School.

We hold a number of additional activities for women and children (Appendix 5). We aim to be as family oriented as possible and the majority of our activities have been driven from the needs of these families.

The community hold weekly programmes on Mondays, Thursdays, Fridays and Saturdays for adults and children to practice our faith, learning Quraan and prayers. Youth members use the centre every Monday and Friday evening for youth activities and how to become good citizens of Scotland. Our children use the centre to socialise with each other and have fun. The centre is used every day during the months of Ramadan and Muharam and other events such as weddings and funerals. However, last four – five years, we had a huge numbers of refugee come from Iraq which required lots of support and help with their new life and more coming, the centre was able to provide individuals with safe environment for immigrants to come and make the centre second home as most of these families and individuals suffered from stress due to culture differences, lack of language and experiences, therefore we need to improve the fabric of the centre and make it energy efficient in order to use the centre even more to provide our community users with the best possible help and support. This year our work has extended to supporting more refugees from Syria, Kuwait and other Middle Eastern countries that have been affected by the Syrian war.